photography and circumstance

Tag Archives: prime lenses

One of the main challenges of shooting everything with a prime lens is that it’s a fixed (aka, cemented in stone) focal length. For the past couple of years I’ve been mostly a zoom shooter. With the EOS M, I trying to stick with the compact 22mm prime.

Most of my shooting for the past month or two has been with prime lenses. When I got into digital photography way back in 2010, I gravitated towards zooms. Good zooms with IS (image stabilization) are OK when the light is low, but there comes a time when a fast prime is needed–and fast primes (I gleaned rather quickly) are yet another photographic learning curve. This guy, unbeknownst to him, helped me while I was experimenting with focus points and shallow depth of field in a very low light situation.

For my birthday fun today (actually yesterday because it’s the wee hours now) I left the zoom at home and headed downtown (walking with Mags) to shoot some photos with only a prime attached to my camera. The lens of choice was the Canon 40mm f/2.8 pancake–aka, the “Shorty Forty.” I’ve already posted some shots of my focus/bokeh tests with the lens, but this is the first time I’ve used it away from the homestead. It was a fun exercise, and besides being ridiculously low profile and lightweight, the lens focuses quickly and is very sharp. No doubt, I’ll be using the 40mm more often.

This past weekend I payed around a bit with my prime lenses set at various shutter and ISO settings at f/4 and below. This example is a tweaked crop of the top of the old man cactus on our patio. When I took the shot the cactus was in full shade and the backdrop was a totally hot midday sunlit field. Obviously, the depth of field was VERY shallow. I used Photoshop to pull the detail out of the shadows which, in turn, homogenized the background. Why not?